Almost Pool

Dear new dreamer.

Your desires are now a perfectly smooth, warm, flat and empty pool table, in the feeble light of your airy life. The rails are your only cushon-covered boundaries and the pockets at every corner and side are just too many opportunities waiting to be taken. Take your time for contemplating the perfectly shaped diamonds around table, playing with the light. Dream about your busy gaze while scratching the cue stick tip, like a passionate professional in the middle of a top class tournament.

You'll soon learn that Destiny loves picking its challengers in the middle of their thoughts and you will be no exception: you'll feel the cue stick sliding around the thumb all of the sudden and your sight will be already reflecting on the white of your ball. When the match started? Who is your opponent? Are you good enough?

You won't care, I'm telling you. Because you don't have to - I'm sure you'll just try to give your best shot.

The cue stick will hit the ball so fiercely that it will throw that sphere to the object balls like a thunder - with the very same crackling sound too. Marvel. Coloured balls will scatter around the table like a wild firework, hitting now the side rail and now the foot one, maliciously running around the pocket points. You will watch that caleidoscopic scene sweating with your fakest smile, hanged to the joint of the cue stick: is pool just hoping for a ball going in?

All the trajectories will cross together like an infinite evansecent tangle. You'll follow all of them, like you could be able to drag them into the pockets with just your sight... and then you'll hear that clatter coming from the unknown.

You'll hear the first snapping fingers celebrating your result from the sides of the table: you will pocket your first ball so soon! While smiling and slowly walking around the table, your heart will skip a beat. And that moment will be so memorable and bittersweet.

Balls will become lesser and lesser, making the game so naturally harder and that clatter will became so painfully rare that you'll forgot. Every ball will progressively need all of your strategy, your dexterity, your luck and your guts for reaching its place. You'll use some of them just for getting nearby another one more interesting. You'll blindly hit some of them just hoping for shuffling things a bit.

And creepy thoughts will start crawling into your dreams: is pool just pocketing some balls? Are professionals people just good at that game? A ball pocketed evaluating a precise geometry is truly better than one pocketed using pure luck?

Dear old dreamer, I'm begging you. Don't lose your passion when the balls on the table are just a few and the game got tougher.

Plot!

Ready to be the next Pool Champion? Get ready for Almost Pool, the most unreliable and unrealistic computer pool simulation! Clear the table within the shoots limit but beware: once you've finished your game, you'll get a huge bonus for pocketing balls in order or in a row! Use UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT for aiming and hold down the A BUTTON for calibrating the shot power. Good luck!

PS: A year later I've added some sound effects and a cheat mode I've missed in the first game revision. A little trivia: the article within this game is based on a real life experience. My father has been a pretty good (or, at least, very passionate) pool player and, when I was a kid, he used to take me to the green tables from time to time. This article scene is based on a memory of one of these events that happened in Sicily.